Flash design of a scowling blue daruma-style mask with crossed swords behind it and the script lettering Read Between The Lines above, with no placement on the body shown.

Angry blue daruma mask with crossed swords

Japanese · Colour · Flash

The design shows a scowling blue mask with a red rounded backdrop, one large staring eye and one narrowed eye, and a thick open-mouthed brow. Two crossed swords with grey blades and gold-accented hilts sit behind the lower face, and the words Read Between The Lines are written across the top in an orange flowing script. The linework is bold and outlined with shading in darker blues and reds on a dark, splattered background.

Japanese Mask Sword Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the fire, because this is the part where the wind comes down off the black pines and tries to get in under the door. There was a doll-maker in the village at the edge of that forest who painted daruma for a living, round as river stones. He never painted the eyes in before a sale. The buyer had to make a wish first, and only then would he fill in the left eye, so the wish could be seen to be kept.

Keep reading

One autumn a magistrate's clerk came up the path with a sealed letter and two swords wrapped in oilcloth. The lord wanted a daruma that would frighten his debtors, a scowling blue face with a brow like thunder. The doll-maker said he could paint anger, but he would not paint it until he had heard the letter read aloud. It said nothing about debts. It said the well at the foot of the village was to be moved uphill, so the water would run to the lord's own house. The words were polite, and the meaning was a blade laid flat against the throat.

So the doll-maker painted the mask as ordered, blue and fierce, one eye wide open and the other narrowed to a slit, and he laid the swords crossed beneath its jaw. Then he took a finer brush and wrote along the top, in the same flowing hand the clerk had used, the words the lord would be too proud to question: read between the lines. The clerk carried it down the hill, pleased with his commission.

The lord read the mask as a threat and the village read the words as a warning, and by spring the well stayed where it had always been. Nobody ever learned what the doll-maker wished for. He left the left eye blank, and it is still blank on every daruma that came out of his workshop, so that the buyer must finish the seeing for themselves.